Small Sacrifices (23 page)

Welch suggested that perhaps Nora might care to wait outside. Lew shook his head. "She stays. Nora knows everything. I want her here." .

Nora Lewiston would prove to be the most pragmatic of

women. She knew her husband had had an affair with Diane Downs, and she had forgiven everything. She prompted Lew with her own computerlike memory of dates, times, places. The detectives soon learned that they could count on Nora's recall more than on that of almost anyone involved in the case. She was pretty, tiny, and blonde, and scarcely looked the part of a betrayed wife.

Both Lewistons were candid; they seemed very open.

They had been married in September, 1979, in Texas where Lew carried mail. It was a second marriage for each. Nora was from Chandler and, homesick, she'd persuaded Lew to move to Arizona where her family lived.

Suddenly, there were stresses on the marriage.

Lew studied the toes of his boots. "I didn't really want to come to Chandler. I liked Texas; I liked my job there. We had a three-bedroom house in Galveston and the payments were only

$325 a month. Here, we bought a two-bedroom house and we pay

$650! I resented the move, but it was kind of subconscious; I didn't realize quite how much I resented it."

Nora nodded. "Things weren't going great for us. We moved back to Arizona at Thanksgiving, 1981. Lew and I were on shaky ground in our marriage when Diane came along--mostly because of money. The house payments were more, and then Lew found a great piece of land he had to have. It cost $23,000 and that meant I had to go to work full time. I didn't mind, but our lives changed. I got up at dawn to cook his breakfast before he went out on the route, and then I went to my job. I was ready for bed at seven.

\Ve weren't having much fun, or doing any partying at all ... I ^yas a sitting duck for Diane."

Lew said he'd met Diane at the Chandler post office that November of 1981. He had found her very nice, very gracious in

answering his questions. She'd been pregnant with the surrogate baby then, and he noticed she'd mostly hung around with Tim Lowry.

"We were good letter carriers," Lew recalled. "We delivered a lot of mail. We were only friends."

But then, after Diane had her surrogate baby, Lew fell on the loading dock, shattering his elbow. He was confined to jobs he could do inside the post office. That threw him together with Diane constantly.

It was July and hot. Diane wore cut-off T-shirts to work with no bra underneath, and when she reached up to put mail in the high boxes, the lower portion of her full breasts peeked out. It was difficult for Lew to glance away.

Lew and Diane were together day after day.

"We just sort of hit it off," Lew remembered. "I told her from the beginning that all I had in mind was a fling." Welch glanced at Nora Lewiston. She was not discomfited.

"I'd had affairs before," Lew admitted. "During my first marriage. Not affairs even--just short-term, easy-going things. I guess that's what I expected with Diane."

Lew said he'd found Diane physically attractive, and he

admired her brains, her memory. "She had a good memory. She had memorized thirty-six or thirty-seven postal routes." Lew said he knew that Diane was already planning to be

inseminated again as soon as possible. That seemed to be the most important thing in her life--that and becoming a doctor-and he was convinced she wasn't interested in a lasting alliance ^th a man. She was simply flirting with him, he thought, when ^e complained she had no boyfriend. He asked her why she

l Adn't have an affair.

"She said she couldn't do that because she'd get pregnant, ^d I said, 'No. Why don't you have an affair with someone who ^on't get you pregnant?' and she said, 'Like who?'

"And I said, 'Like me.' "

^wiston, an admitted "hardhead," had actually been on the ence' rankled at being uprooted from Texas. Restless and vaguely , ""sppy in Arizona, he thought a brief fling-not an affair--with 154 ANN RULE

Diane seemed like an answer. He wasn't going to get her pregnant; he told Alton and Welch he'd had a vasectomy when he was twenty-one. He liked kids--he just never wanted to have any of his own.

It was the classic married-man/single-woman situation, one that is played out ten thousand times a day, a pas de deux in the dance/war between men and women.

Lew Lewiston had no inkling of how obsessive Diane could be.

Psychiatrists had warned the surrogate clinic that Diane had problems with understanding "social cause-and-effect reasoning," and that she had poor judgment and poor understanding because she was depressed and anxious. Although she had acquired virtually no protective devices, Diane had continued to polish her cocky, brazen facade.

Diane--who felt she had been given nothing--now wanted

EVERYTHING.

It would have taken a professional to see the real woman behind Diane's smiling mask, to winnow the truth from her continual bright patter. Diane made armor out of monologue.

Lew Lewiston wasn't a professional psychologist. He was a man momentarily attracted to a beautiful woman--a man about to buy a ticket to ride where the wheels sped faster and faster, until there was no safe way to jump off.

Diane marked the day she was first intimate with Lew Lewiston, just as she noted all of the important dates of her lifetime: X's on a calendar or lines in a diary to signify romantic encounters, birthdates, even dates she conceived children. Lew warranted a huge red X on one of the calendars detectives removed from her apartment on the night of May 19.

He explained now that Diane had choreographed the affair. She had found ways for them to be together. To begin with they were restricted to quick kisses in parked cars. They they me1 often after work in Diane's trailer. For weeks there was no communion

beyond sex: an hour, a half hour--and Lew was gone.

One time only they'd gone to a motel. Lew longed for some discretion, but Diane talked about him constantly in the post office and the affair was soon common knowledge.

Nora Lewiston had known there was another woman. "Lew s a lousy liar. I knew from almost the beginning. It started the second week of July, 1982."

Nora kept her suspicions to herself, but she kept track of dates and times too--jotting down those periods when she suspected her husband was with someone else.

Lew said he'd seldom seen Christie, Cheryl, and Danny. "I wouldn't be with her if the children were around. It was an ^fair--it didn't seem right." Diane shuttled the kids around between

Steve, Mary Ward, and her Aunt Irene.

Lew had seen Danny, but Danny didn't know who he was.

"Diane's Aunt Irene had this little second-hand furniture place, and it was on my mail route. She looked after Danny a lot. He'd see me coming and he'd come bounding out, running, yelling, 'Hi, mailman!' "

It became apparent to Lew as the summer of 1982 progressed that Diane was far more serious than he'd intended. She still planned to be a doctor; she still planned to return to Louisville to be inseminated. But she added one more ambition to her already burgeoning roster: she decided to marry him.

She knew he wasn't interested in being a father; she assured him she would just have to find a way that the kids wouldn't bother him. Diane seemed not to hear him when he reminded her

that he had no intention of leaving his wife.

Lew had observed that Diane had tired of her lovers after a brief liaison. He assumed he would be like all the rest. Too late Lew realized Diane wanted only him. To possess him utterly. In August, Steve Downs asked Diane for a trial reconciliation.

"I told her to go for it," Lew said. "I told her to try to work out things in her marriage."

It was a most unrealistic reconciliation. Diane stipulated that there was to be no physical contact. Steve moved into her trailer, but he moved out within the week.

Lewiston told the detectives that he'd met Steve face-to-face infrequently. "He came to the trailer one day and he warned me, i Diane is kind of crazy when it comes to sex. She has some Problems--emotional problems--about it.' "

Nora described the Chandler post office's annual picnic in August of 1982: "Diane filled her plate at the buffet, and then she ^17 deliberately sat down across the picnic table from us. I

looked from her to Lew . . . and it clicked. Wives have antennae;

^e was the one."

Nora said she'd been disturbed by the odd interplay between ^lane and her kids. The kids wore faded clothes and Diane hadn't

756 ANN RULE

bothered to comb their hair--although Diane's outfit was brand new.

"She just plopped herself down across from us. She was wearing a T-shirt without a bra, and short-shorts. It was very strange. She would call her children over--and she'd ask them the same kind of questions over and over. She'd keep asking them

'Do you love Mommy?' and 'You love Mommy more than you

love Daddy, don't you?' And the kids were confused and

embarrassed."

After the picnic Nora said nothing. She knew that Lew would tell her soon enough.

Paul Alton and Doug Welch listened to the astounding chronology of the summer and fall of 1982. In September, Diane had

given Christie, Cheryl, and Danny back to Steve. The youngsters had apparently led a gypsy existence all their lives. They'd lived on farms, in towns, in motels, in the trailer, with their grandparents, and in and out of the Palomino house. They'd been dragged along as their mother rushed willy-nilly through life, like rag dolls bumping along the ground behind a hyperactive child.

Christie and Cheryl had begged to go to the Pomeroy School, and they lived with their father to be in that school district. Diane was allowed to see them whenever she wanted, but she plunged into a punishing school schedule for the fall quarter. She babysat grudgingly for her children occasionally.

Her schedule sounded almost impossible. She worked at the Chandler post office Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday from six in the morning until two-thirty in the afternoon. She went to school all day Tuesdays and Thursdays and to night school on Mondays and Wednesdays. She also had an appointment in Louisville for her second insemination.

Diane lasted only a few weeks into the fall semester. She found that she had no time for anything but work, classes, and studying. She apparently realized her life would be like that for years and years and years if she wanted to be a doctor. She worried because she didn't have enough time to see Lew.

Doug Welch noticed Lewiston's hands trembled as he told them that the affair had escalated far beyond anything he had envisioned. It weighed like a rock on his conscience. Lew loved his

wife, but he couldn't get off the merry-go-round.

"My wife wasn't getting home til five, so I had lots of tiin6 in the afternoon. And the affair went on and went on. I li^ to

Nora all the time and told her nothing was going on, never would admit it. Ahhh . . . but it continued. Finally, in September-exactly September twelfth, my birthday--I told Nora about the affair."

Diane had left three days before to fly to Louisville.

She had noticed a slight vaginal discharge, and she'd accused Lew of giving her a venereal disease. Bewildered, Lew told Diane that he had no symptoms and he hadn't been with anyone but her and Nora.

"I had to tell Nora to protect her," Lew explained to Welch and Alton. "And that meant everything would hit the fan." And so, just before she flew to Kentucky, Lew broke up with Diane.

Predictably, she refused to believe he meant it.

"Lew told me," Nora remembered ruefully. "It was his birthday . . . He told me we'd have to go to some clinic and get

treated. It was so awful to think about that we had to do something and we sure didn't care to celebrate his birthday, so we moved all

the furniture in the house that night--until we were exhausted. We did go to the clinic, and we were so humiliated. We had some kind of infection with a long name I can't remember now--but it was something that was transmitted by sexual intercourse." Diane was the likely source; she had slept with at least four men that summer. Although her contract stipulated that the surrogate mother be free of any disease, she did not cancel her trip. The detectives were beginning to see that each of Diane

Downs's plans hinged on the next. She had apparently needed this next baby and the emotional high that would come with it. She needed the $10,000 fee to help build her huge house so her children wouldn't bother Lew.

At the center of everything was Lew Lewiston. Diane had

evidently hoped that Lew's forced confession to Nora would end his marriage. Her strategy didn't work. Nora Lewiston was not about to give her husband up without a fight. She heard his confession, and she forgave him.

As Welch and Alton continued to talk to the Lewistons and to the others who moved in Diane's world in Arizona, they were sble to piece together an astounding life. They reported each

new chunk of information to Fred Hugi and Dave Burks.

Whether because of the infection, the profound stress she ^s living under, or some more ephemeral reason, Diane did not

158 ANN RULE

conceive in Louisville. She could not have known that as she flew home to Chandler, but she was gripped by black depression anyway. Diane hurried up the off-ramp, scanning the crowd behind the ropes for Lew's face and his wide shoulders towering above the others waiting there in Sky Harbor Airport.

Lew wasn't there. Steve was.

She would sooner have seen the devil himself.

Diane and Steve had had a physical fight two weeks before. Lew said she'd showed up at work the next day with a black eye, and swollen nose, and black-and-blue bruises on her face and neck.

When Steve met her at the airport, he wanted to talk about one more reconciliation. He had come alone to pick her up, leaving the children with a sitter.

Diane was like a strand of elastic tugged so taut that, released, it no longer snapped back. Her behavior on the night of